memory palace

I have slept for eleven out of the last twenty-four hours, and now that I think about it, thirteen out of the last thirty hours. I mean, I haven't been staying up really late or getting up really early since last week. What's going on?

Edited to add: no happy lamp today because I slept well past sunrise. Also, I've only had one cup of tea today. Gosh, that may explain everything.

Long, but not under a cut because this is SFW. I received so much info that much of this writing is for the benefit of my own memory.

So I got up at 0400 yesterday morning, having woken up even earlier, to go to San Francisco for a facial feminization consult with Dr. Jordan Deschamps-Braly, hereafter known as the Sculptor*.

Caffeine the first: my tea with breakfast.

Too early for transit meant a Sikh driver who wanted to talk. Seldom have I felt more ickily like one of Them. I didn’t tell him where I was going.

Caffeine the second: a Coke at SEA. I probably didn't need to get up as early as I did, but given the recent airport chaos, who knew?

Plane. BART. Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy.

Caffeine the third: a Red Bull at the Willows in SoMa. The Willows has amazing burgers and I always go there at least once when I’m down there for Folsom. The place was nearly deserted at opening time on a Wednesday, and I got to tell the lady behind the counter why I was there. I tried not to take her “Sex with you sucks” t-shirt personally.

Saw some of the Mission on the way to BART. It's... a little rough, as I'd heard.

I killed a few minutes in Union Square, just steps from where I went to Exmother’s sixtieth birthday party at the St. Francis, and around the corner from her old workplace. Yes, I gloated to myself for outliving that awful woman.

On the block next to the Sculptor’s office was the medical imaging. I had to hold reeeeally still for the 3-D scan, but otherwise it was no big deal.

Thence to the Sculptor’s office, which is on Union Square, next door to Tiffany’s and two doors down from the old Saks Fifth Avenue space. Building security? Tight as a drum. Interior design? In intimidatingly impeccable taste. Good Goddess, I don’t even want to speculate about the cash flow through that place.

Caffeine the fourth: one and a half cups of coffee at the Deschamps-Braly clinic. They have branded napkins, for heaven’s sake.

The sculptor’s staff has on-point social skills and basically coaxed much of my life story out of me. I think they wanted to make sure that I was a) going to be able to pay and b) not going to be a Problem Patient. Hey, I'm an heiress who's high on life, and especially in medical matters, I'm not a brat.

The Sculptor and his staff were at pains to point out that recovery won’t be a party. The Sculptor doesn’t like to prescribe opioid painkillers; he says that anti-inflammatories yield better healing. Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s going to suck. But Dancer has volunteered to help me out; the Sculptor says she’ll only need to stick around for two or three days.

The money? About the same as that nasty, unethical guy up here in Seattle. And this guy is the chosen successor of Dr. John Osterhout, who was The Guy for FFS for at least a couple of decades. Dr. O, as he was known in the community, is older than dirt but alive and reluctantly retired. Honestly, the only difference money-wise is going to be that I can’t do the first ten to twelve days of recovery at home.

Fun fact: the Sculptor insists on a couple of hours’ walking per day as soon as I’m able to. It occurs to me that my little jaunt to Amoeba Music on Haight St. shortly after sex reassignment surgery may have done more good than harm. Ah, advances in medicine.

Another fun fact: the Sculptor says that there’s no need to discontinue the girl ‘roids around the time of surgery. That’s what the kids have been telling me. They’ll be happy to hear that they’re right. For decades surgeons were afraid of the clotting risks from estrogens.

Yet another fun fact: FFS as done by the Sculptor takes about five hours. Dr. O’s surgeries typically took twice that, at least. Sex reassignment took four hours. Oh by the way, he considers Dr. Bowers (AKA Dr. Snip) a friend.

The Sculptor showed me many, many before & after pics and rapidly told me the procedures he did on each. They were, I dunno, maybe three or four percent of the eighteen hundred FFS surgeries that he’s done. He convinced me that he knows what he’s doing. Oh yeah: there were a few full-color pictures of what various parts of the face look like in the middle of surgery; not for the squeamish.

So what did I tell him my priorities are?

1. Getting rid of my damn brow ridges. The reason the Sculptor likes to move bone around for that instead of just grinding is that “like most people”, I have a frontal sinus (i.e. a cavity), which complicates matters.
2. Less of a tough-guy jawline. It looked way better on my maternal grandfather.
3. Staying out of uncanny valley. He says he’ll be “conservative” with my nose to that end. Good.

There are some tweaks he has to do just to keep the various parts of my face in proportion. Shiyou ga nai, ne?

I tell you what, I’ve been CT scanned, X-rayed, photographed, and measured with a ruler** in what was probably the least sexy orgy of biometric data acquisition I’ve ever experienced, and that includes mammograms.

Made a mad dash to BART. Couldn’t help noticing a sweet young thing in tall boots on the train. Had a lovely if rushed dinner with my college chums S & H in Oakland. Flew home out of OAK. Was delayed getting home by light rail maintenance. Fell asleep immediately despite personal best caffeine abuse, but did not sleep enough for the second night in a row.

I’ve finally come up with a good simile for how it felt: like Dorothy upon arrival in Oz. I just emailed the Sculptor’s office, “Where do I sign?”



*This may be the first time I’ve chosen a moniker for someone because their real name is too damn long. How does a guy roughly my age from Oklahoma get a name like that, anyway?
**By the Sculptor himself. I resisted the temptation to make a phrenology joke. He’s surely heard them all.